A collection of miscellaneous basic statistic functions and convenience wrappers for efficiently describing data. The author's intention was to create a toolbox, which facilitates the (notoriously time consuming) first descriptive tasks in data analysis, consisting of calculating descriptive statistics, drawing graphical summaries and reporting the results. The package contains furthermore functions to produce documents using MS Word (or PowerPoint) and functions to import data from Excel. Many of the included functions can be found scattered in other packages and other sources written partly by Titans of R. The reason for collecting them here, was primarily to have them consolidated in ONE instead of dozens of packages (which themselves might depend on other packages which are not needed at all), and to provide a common and consistent interface as far as function and arguments naming, NA handling, recycling rules etc. are concerned. Google style guides were used as naming rules (in absence of convincing alternatives). The 'camel style' was consequently applied to functions borrowed from contributed R packages as well.

Functions to fit log-multiplicative models using 'gnm', with
support for convenient printing, plots, and jackknife/bootstrap
standard errors. For complex survey data, models can be fitted from
design objects from the 'survey' package. Currently supported models
include UNIDIFF (Erikson & Goldthorpe), a.k.a. log-multiplicative
layer effect model (Xie), and several association models: Goodman's
row-column association models of the RC(M) and RC(M)-L families
with one or several dimensions; two skew-symmetric association
models proposed by Yamaguchi and by van der Heijden & Mooijaart.
Functions allow computing the intrinsic association coefficient
(and therefore the Altham index), including via the Bayes shrinkage
estimator proposed by Zhou; and the RAS/IPF/Deming-Stephan algorithm.

Classes and methods for spatial
data; the classes document where the spatial location information
resides, for 2D or 3D data. Utility functions are provided, e.g. for
plotting data as maps, spatial selection, as well as methods for
retrieving coordinates, for subsetting, print, summary, etc.